A news item from UCLA appears innocuous: “The University of California at Los Angeles Academic Senate has voted, 85-to-18, to approve a plan to require all undergraduates in the primary undergraduate college at UCLA to complete at least one course in a diversity topic.” Yet future historians will likely elevate the announcement as the symbol of the final victory in the campus wars initiated in the late 1970s by a new breed of radical scholars. Spawned in the Leftist doctrine of the 1960s and early 1970s, their objective was the annihilation of traditional Western values in higher education.
Applying Soviet-style disinformation methods, traditional teachers on the verge of tenure were maliciously attacked with innuendo, whisper campaigns, anonymous letters, and public vilification accusing them of racism, homophobia, chauvinism and even imperialism (for daring to support U.S. military objectives). Chancellors and presidents stood by in cowardly silence as good and decent men and women were banished by the new radical elite. As the civil war in academia raged on out of public view behind ivy-covered walls, new hires were subjected to a litmus test that placed adherence to “human rights,“ diversity,” and “politically correct” attitudes ahead of academic achievement. By the 1990s, faculties in liberal arts colleges and departments were almost entirely composed of radicals who discriminated against traditional scholars. By the late 1990s, each member of the professoriate sang from the same multicultural and politically correct songbook or walked the plank.
After eliminating or staining professors who represented the established order, it was a simple step to axe required courses in history and English and manufacture new courses in politically motivated curriculum, emphasizing feminism, gay rights, black identity, and environmentalism. A basic liberal arts required curriculum, once the identifying characteristic of ”educated” ladies and gentlemen, has been abandoned, creating new generations of cultural zombies who, deprived of the rich 4000-year old inheritance of Western civilization, are re-shaping the world in their own superficial image. Video games, “sexting,” Facebook, and Twitter are representative of a culture in decline.
The new order on campus that has degraded society can be seen in the scandals involving money ball athletes enrolling in “slide” courses to maintain eligibility. However, it’s not about jocks taking crip courses, it’s the sad reality most offerings today in the field of the liberal arts are designed to gauge or influence student sensitivity to discrimination, not scholastic ability. The African-American course offerings at UNC-Chapel Hill, where public outrage is reaching a crescendo after ghost courses were uncovered, is no better or worse than the content offered within gender studies, sex technique, transvestite careers, lesbian and queer rights and the rest of the bull hockey masquerading as legitimate class work.
Had the athletes involved in the UNC case been white, they just as easily would have taken gender studies for an easy A as black studies or Swahili. Athletics are a red herring distracting honest inquiry into what’s wrong at Chapel Hill and hundreds of other schools of higher learning. The curriculum today is tainted by radicalism and identity politics, giving rise to fraud and misadventure by athletes and ordinary students. And college administrators reflect the degradation of standards. After all, they are pawns to faculty doctrine.